Let's be honest about what the 2025–26 ISL season is. It is not a glamour showcase. It is not the Premier League. It is not even the I-League of thirty years ago, when Mohun Bagan and East Bengal packed Salt Lake Stadium and the noise could be heard across the Maidan. What it is, as one football journalist put it in January 2026, is a survival season. And survival, sometimes, is everything.
The Indian Super League came this close to not happening this year. FSDL, the Football Sports Development Limited that had operated the league since 2014, formally informed clubs in June 2025 that the season was on hold because of unresolved contractual issues. No bids came in for commercial partners. The Supreme Court of India had to intervene. Sports Minister Mansukh Mandaviya chaired an emergency meeting in January 2026 to cobble together a framework. The result: a compressed, thirteen-game, single-leg round-robin season — the 12th edition of the ISL — run directly by the AIFF for the first time in its history.
The Numbers Are Humbling
The central budget for the 2025–26 ISL season is approximately ₹24.26 crore. That is not the prize money. That is the entire operational budget. In a previous season, individual franchise fees ran to multiples of that figure. This year, clubs paid a ₹1 crore participation fee — reimbursable from central revenues. The AIFF contributed nearly ₹9.77 crore upfront.
Clubs have slashed player contracts, sought voluntary pay cuts and renegotiated every deal they could find. Infrastructure costs have forced some teams to consider away-heavy schedules. This is not a league in the ascendant. This is a league in the ICU, being kept alive by football's believers.
But the Sport Itself Has Not Stopped
And here is what makes Indian football's story stubbornly compelling despite everything: the game on the pitch has not suffered as dramatically as the boardroom drama would suggest.
Mohun Bagan Super Giant, the defending champions who won both the League Winners' Shield and the ISL Cup in 2024–25, entered the season as the benchmark. Fourteen clubs are competing. Relegation has been introduced for the first time — the bottom team drops to the Indian Football League, while the IFL champions come up. It is a structural reform that European football has always considered essential to competitive integrity, and its arrival in Indian football is significant regardless of the season's financial circumstances.
The ISL champion will earn an AFC Champions League Two qualifying berth — entry into continental competition that gives Indian clubs exposure to higher tactical and physical demands than anything available domestically. Mumbai City and Mohun Bagan have already carried that flag into Asia, and the results, while mixed, have begun to build India's club coefficient — the invisible currency of continental football standing.
The Global Gap Is Real
Let's not pretend the gap to global competitiveness doesn't exist, because it is vast. India's top clubs entering AFC Champions League Two qualifying face the reality that the entry-level of elite Asian club football is already several levels above anything the ISL's average week produces.
The average attendance in ISL 2024–25 was 13,155 per game. The highest was 41,202 at a Mohun Bagan match. For context, the K-League in South Korea regularly averages 12,000 even for mid-table clubs, with the top clubs pulling double or triple that. Japan's J-League has clubs with stadium capacities and fan cultures that dwarf anything in India. Even in Southeast Asia, clubs from Thailand and Vietnam are building professional structures that outpace the ISL.
The 3+1 foreign player rule — limiting clubs to three overseas players plus one from an AFC nation — has been scrapped, which at least removes an administrative handicap. But the more fundamental issue is infrastructure. High stadium maintenance costs, security concerns, and the absence of a year-round club calendar (the ISL runs only part of the year) prevent Indian clubs from building the playing identity and tactical coherence that sustained continental success requires.
Mohun Bagan's ban from AFC competitions until 2028–29, for refusing to travel to Iran for an away fixture, is a revealing episode. Continental football's demands — on budgets, logistics and institutional courage — are simply not something Indian clubs are yet consistently equipped to meet.
Why There Is Still Reason to Watch
Despite all of this, Indian football's structural foundations are more serious now than at any point in its modern history. The AIFF governing the ISL directly, with a 22-member council including club representation, is a mature institutional arrangement. The introduction of relegation creates accountability that the franchise model never had. Football Video Support is being adopted. The promotion-relegation link with the I-League is finally operational.
FanCode won the broadcasting rights for 2025–26 and sublicensed linear TV to Sony Sports Network — ensuring the league remains on screen. Fourteen clubs, 91 matches, played to a genuine competitive conclusion.
And for all the financial distress, a 15-year-old from Guwahati watching Mohun Bagan play under the Kolkata lights doesn't know about the survival budget. He just knows the ball goes in the net, and his city went crazy.
That's where football lives. And India hasn't lost that.